Visual Art

Nigerian painter Ben Ibebe has returned to the Miami Valley for a second art show, New Works, at Front Street. Ibebe visited the WYSO studios to talk with Niki Dakota about the upcoming opening. He was joined by the Collaboratory's Peter Benkendorf.

Ben Ibebe's New Works exhibition opens on August 19th at Front Street in downtown Dayton.

Katherine Kadish is a Yellow Springs painter who’s worked professionally for over 40 years. She known for her strikingly colorful paintings and monotypes, and her work is owned by the Library of Congress and the Dayton Art Institute. She also has a commission for the new Dayton Public Library. But Kadish has been living with an eye disease called Macular Degeneration since she was a teenager and she has very limited eyesight.

Husband and wife team Tom Heaphey and Vicki Rulli own Itinerant Studio. A production art company based out of a former dry goods warehouse in downtown Springfield Ohio just down the road from the Clark County Public Library on West Jefferson Street. Itinerant Studio occupies a unique niche in the art world creating large print photography on materials like wood, metal and plexiglass and selling to clients all around the world. Community Voices producer Dan Gummel stopped by to hear the story.

In the late 1980’s, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition “The Perfect Moment” fueled the fire of the so-called “Culture Wars” that pitted politicians like Senator Jesse Helms and the religious right against artists and museums in a battle over federal arts funding and first amendment rights. When Mapplethorpe’s exhibit opened at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the museum and its director were brought up on obscenity charges. Twenty-five years later, the museum, through a major exhibit and symposium, is considering the impact of those events on the arts in America.

For part-time artists, juggling career, home, and family can be challenging. Some find the solution in a Third Space, a place where their talents can mature. Community Voices producer Marika Snider talks with two local artists about finding their Third Space.

Vincent Van Gogh said that brushstrokes are like speech. And if an artist is disabled and cannot make art, they are silenced. Anyone who knows about We Care Arts in Kettering knows that they burst these confines and help hundreds of people with disabilities to create on canvas, in clay, with cloth, and more. Last year, some 1,300 people took classes or worked in their studio.

On Friday, January 9th, the Advanced/AP Studio Art class from Yellow Springs Highschool will present View of the Village, an art exhibition at Village Artisans. Kaleidoscope's Tom Amrhein is in the class and spoke with his classmates and teacher about the process of putting the show together and shared those interviews in a conversation with Juliet Fromholt on the air.

For most of us photography is a permanent record, a memory captured forever. Community Voices producer Tanya Maus brings us a story about Dayton photographer Francis Shanberger who makes pictures that challenge our notions of contemporary photography.

The city of Dayton’s First Friday, a monthly event that opens up downtown art galleries and businesses to draw in visitors, is coming up this week, but it comes with bad news from one downtown gallery. The Connecting Art and Design Community (CADC), formerly known as the Cannery Gallery, is shutting its doors at the end of the month.

Christy Jennewein, who heads the gallery and event space and was involved in founding First Fridays, says she has struggled with funding.

Thursday evening, the Springfield Museum of Art will hold an event called Members Matter. At the gathering, museum officials plan to announce a budget surplus and an increase in membership.

Last year, Springfield's Museum of Art adopted a best practices model used by other museums around the country. The move eliminated three positions including a curator, a membership coordinator and a security manager.